Happy Cruelty Day!: Daily Celebrations of Quiet Desperation

“A collection of short, fictional tales presented in the form of a daily calendar. 365 new holidays, with absurdly hilarious new ways to celebrate each day of your life. Happy Cruelty Day is adapted from Powers’s long-running, acclaimed website Girlsarepretty.com.”

This is one of those books that I took from the boyfriend thinking it was something I would like. I am very much a morbid, dark humor sort of person. I thought this would hit me right in the feels. Instead it was mildly funny, mostly annoying, and pretty much forgettable.

The idea was pretty fantastic. The problem is I like to read books from beginning to end in a short period of time. This book is not something you can do that with. If you just read this as a book, then it is very tiresome and pretty much unreadable. If this was read a short bit at a time or one day at a time then it might have been more amusing.

Add in instances of transphobia like on page 42. The author refers to a “transgender male” but is actually talking about a transwoman. The joke is completely lost in this microagression against transwomen. I don’t see why white cismales think it is funny to talk about transwomen the way they do. I lost all respect for the book at that point. Problem was there were so many more pages after.

While this could have been an amazing book if the author didn’t stoop to microagression against oppressed groups. If he instead had more passages about how white males use the social justice movements to get laid, that would have been funny. I did actually share that with someone else who is very active in the social justice world and they laughed quite hard. However, I had to stop them from reading more as the rest of the book is not as friendly.

This book is hit or miss and not meant to be read as a book, but instead as a small break when you have a few minutes.

2 out of 5 stars. I would not recommend this book, though a passage or two are worth a read.